Bug 43231 – [dev-lang/tcl-8.3]: manpages linked using hardlinks -- huge waste of diskspace after compression

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description bartron 2004-02-28 15:30:44 UTC]

More information: If a tcl manpage describes more than one command 
(the majority of pages in `man3' and `mann' do), hard links are used 
to link the additional names to the same page.  However...when the 
manpages are compressed later, hard links are broken (because of the 
way gzip works, it stores information about the uncompressed file as
part of the comressed file)... resulting in multiple compressed 
copies of the same content.  For instance, 

  OpenFileChnl.3.gz, Tcl_OpenFileChannel.3.gz, 
  Tcl_OpenCommandChannel.3.gz, Tcl_MakeFileChannel.3.gz, 
  Tcl_GetChannel.3.gz, Tcl_GetChannelNames.3.gz, 
  Tcl_GetChannelNamesEx.3.gz, Tcl_RegisterChannel.3.gz, 
  Tcl_UnregisterChannel.3.gz, Tcl_Close.3.gz, Tcl_ReadChars.3.gz, 
  Tcl_Read.3.gz, Tcl_GetsObj.3.gz, Tcl_Gets.3.gz, Tcl_WriteObj.3.gz, 
  Tcl_WriteChars.3.gz, Tcl_Write.3.gz, Tcl_Flush.3.gz, Tcl_Seek.3.gz, 
  Tcl_Tell.3.gz, Tcl_GetChannelOption.3.gz, 
  Tcl_SetChannelOption.3.gz, Tcl_Eof.3.gz, Tcl_InputBlocked.3.gz, 
  Tcl_InputBuffered.3.gz, Tcl_Ungets.3.gz
  
(26 different files) all uncompress to the exact same data.

  Solution: use symlinks instead (tcl's disk usage in `/usr/share/man'
drops from 3.2M to 814K).  The shortest (not necessarily the cleanest)
fix, 

--- tcl8.3.4/unix/mkLinks.orig
+++ tcl8.3.4/unix/mkLinks
@@ -15,6 +15,9 @@
 # The script takes one argument, which is the name of the directory
 # where the manual entries have been installed.

+set -e
+ln() { /bin/ln -sf "$@"; }
+
 if test $# != 1; then
     echo "Usage: mkLinks dir"
     exit 1

[Comment 1 Doug Goldstein (RETIRED) 2004-08-06 15:46:49 UTC]

I'll take this one and hammer the kinks out.

[Comment 2 Antti Mäkelä 2004-08-14 03:47:02 UTC]

Created attachment 37405 [details, diff]
Catgets patch that fixes locale problems (see comments)

[Comment 3 Antti Mäkelä 2004-08-14 03:47:26 UTC]

Created attachment 37406 [details]
New ebuild for man that uses the catgets patch

[Comment 4 Antti Mäkelä 2004-08-14 03:48:05 UTC]

Comment on attachment 37405 [details, diff]
Catgets patch that fixes locale problems (see comments)

WTF, for some reason this got added into wrong bug. Crap.

[Comment 5 Antti Mäkelä 2004-08-14 03:51:09 UTC]

Sorry about three previous comments. I have *no* idea why my browser for some reason decided to submit those patches to this bug when they should have gone to #37778...And apparently I cannot delete these, either.

[Comment 6 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2005-08-11 11:52:30 UTC]

*** Bug 43235 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Comment 7 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-07-22 09:13:08 UTC]

Is there anybody out there?

[Comment 8 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2007-01-21 14:56:53 UTC]

dev-lang/tcl-8.3* removed from the tree.